Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood (9 page)

So Carmen was shamefully grateful to Valia’s misfiring kidneys as she and Valia shut themselves into Carmen’s car. She was deaf to Valia’s ten-minute harangue about how Carmen didn’t hold the steering wheel right.

They were absurdly early for the appointment, thanks to Carmen’s eagerness, so Carmen was the picture of flexibility when Valia insisted they stop at the ice cream shop around the corner from the hospital. Who was Carmen to turn down ice cream?

Valia wanted pistachio. No, she didn’t, she wanted butter pecan. No, that would not be good.

“Vhy do they have the cookies in the ice cream?” she demanded to know.

“Vhat do they mean by this…
jimmies
?”

“Who vould eat that purple thing?”

Carmen saw the look on the face of the girl behind the counter, and it was familiar. It was a look that she imagined she herself had worn for roughly thirty hours the week before.

Finally, after an excruciating number of questions and unsolicited criticisms, Valia settled on peppermint ice cream, of all things. It was a garish red, and slimy-looking.

Valia took one bite and shoved it toward Carmen. “I hate it. You eat it.”

“I don’t want it.”

“I hate it.” Valia kept pushing it at her.

Carmen was fuming. She hated Valia’s nasty peppermint ice cream too. And furthermore, she hated Valia. Valia was a big, fat baby. Carmen hated babies. She hated old people. She hated everyone in between. She hated everyone.

Except him.

He was a guy—maybe her age or a little older—who walked into the store just as Carmen was dodging the slimy red ice cream.

She didn’t hate him, though at her rate, perhaps she could learn to. He wasn’t Ryan Hennessy or anything, but some quality about him struck her nonetheless. His straight hair was yellowish brown and a little bit unkempt. His eyebrows were almost blond and his freckles made him look kind of jaunty, like he didn’t care about anything too much. His eyes, on the other hand, made him look like he did.

She looked at his face for a moment too long. When she turned her head back, she saw the scoop of ice cream bobbling on Valia’s cone, and it was too late to fix it. Sure enough, the scoop plunged to the ground and skidded a foot or so. Valia, incensed, shouted something at Carmen in Greek and then made a show of striding away. But the peppermint ice cream didn’t just look slimy. Valia’s heel hit the trail of ice cream, and Carmen watched in horror as the old lady went down hard. Carmen’s shout and Valia’s scream mingled and merged in the air.

Almost instantly Carmen had Valia in her arms. Valia was lighter and drier than she would have imagined. Her eyes were squeezed shut and her face was twisted in pain. Carmen could tell that her right leg had crumpled in the wrong direction. When Valia opened her eyes, Carmen saw the blurry tears in them, and she felt awful. Her own eyes filled with tears.

“Oh, Valia,” Carmen murmured, trying to get a strong hold of her under her arms. “I am so sorry.” She heard a little sob escape her own mouth.

At once Carmen saw another pair of arms in the mix. It was the guy she did not yet hate. He was helping her lift Valia from the sticky linoleum.

Now the few other patrons gathered around and the counter girl appeared, bouncing nervously from foot to foot.

Valia moaned. “My leg is hurt,” she said. “Don’t move it. Please.”

“Okay,” Carmen said soothingly. “It’s okay.”

“If you’ll just rest your arm over my shoulder I can support your leg,” the guy coaxed her. He got himself in position and nodded to Carmen as if to tell her it was time to lift. She complied.

Valia moaned again, but they had her off the floor.

“Valia, the emergency room is right around the corner. We’ll take you right there, okay?” Her voice couldn’t have been gentler.

Valia nodded. The ferocity had abandoned her features for once, and they settled sort of sweetly into her face, even in spite of her obvious pain.

Ready?
the nonhateful guy mouthed to Carmen. Suddenly they were partners.

They began to walk, Carmen murmuring reassuring things into Valia’s ear. On the way out of the shop, Carmen’s arms were so occupied she couldn’t catch the door as it swung behind her. The sharp edge of the metal doorframe caught her hard on the back of her arm. Carmen did all she could not to stagger or groan. She pressed her lips together and tried not to release the tears loading up her eyes. She noticed that the guy was looking at her. He glanced at her arm. She didn’t see the blood until he did.

She shrugged a little.
It’s okay
, she mouthed over Valia’s head. She vowed not to let her tears go.

In the emergency room, they eased white-faced Valia carefully into a chair. Then Carmen shifted into a mode of pure efficiency. She talked her way to the front of the line, collecting forms she promised to fill out as soon as Valia was in the hands of a doctor. By some miracle, Carmen discovered that one of the emergency room doctors spoke Greek, and before long Valia was safely, gratefully in an examining room, the Greek words a palliative in her ear.

Then Carmen remembered about the nonhateful guy. When she returned to the waiting room, he was still there, elbows resting on knees in a plastic emergency-room chair.

“Thank you,” she said immediately and earnestly. “That was really, really nice of you.”

“Is she okay?” he asked.

“I hope so. There’s a doctor who speaks Greek, which made her happy. He seemed to think she might have torn a ligament in a knee, but he didn’t think she broke any bones, which is the good news. They’re gonna do an X-ray just in case.”

It was funny to have all this to say, to have this whole project in common with a guy whose name she did not know.

She sat down next to him. He produced a damp paper napkin he’d been holding. “For you.” He pointed to her arm.

“Oh, God. Right.” The blood had stopped flowing and started to dry, but it looked a bit gory nonetheless. She wiped it off with the napkin. “Thanks.”

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Totally fine. It’s a scratch.” It was more than a scratch, but she liked the feeling of being brave.

She looked at the streaky red napkin. He looked at her.

“So…thank you so much. Again,” she said quietly. Carmen wanted to signal to him that he was free to leave, but he didn’t appear to want to leave just yet.

He was still looking at her, like he was trying to figure something out.

“I work here,” he offered to the silence.

“Really?”

“Well, volunteer is more accurate. I’m premed, so I, you know, want to spend time in the real world of medicine. To see if I’m up to it.”

“I bet you are.” Carmen blushed, surprised that she had let that out of her mouth.

“Thanks,” he said, looking down for the first time.

They were silent for a minute or two. He was wearing brown Pumas. He had the goldish sparkle of whiskers on his face like a real grown-up man. His hair had the extra shiny quality of someone who spent a lot of time in a pool. His shoulders were wide and his torso was strong and lanky—most definitely the build of a swimmer.

“Is she your grandmother?” he asked.

“Oh. Valia? No. She’s…well, she’s my…actually, she’s my friend Lena’s grandmother. I was bringing her here for some tests—I mean, not the emergency room. That wasn’t part of the plan.”

“Right.” He smiled. He was looking at her upper arm again.

Shallowly, she felt pleased that she’d injured a part of her body she felt was particularly good to look at.

“Maybe you’ll have to come back again. For the tests,” he said.

“I’m sure I’ll be back,” she said. “Valia can’t drive here—especially now—and I have a car all to myself right now and…”

He nodded. He got up to go. “Maybe I’ll get to see you again. I hope so.”

“Me too,” she said faintly, watching him go. She felt her heart streaming into different parts of her body, places she hadn’t felt it beat before.

And yet, as she went back over the conversation, she felt a trace of apprehension. Valia was her friend Lena’s grandmother. Carmen was bringing her for tests. Carmen had a car to herself.

Carmen was also getting paid eight fifty an hour. She realized she could have mentioned that, too.

Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time—a tremendous whack.
—Winston Churchill

T
oday was a day during which Bridget would almost certainly look upon the face of Eric Richman, and he would look upon hers. It made getting dressed a different project than usual. Usually she didn’t care that much. Or if she did, it was to satisfy her exuberance (like the shiny, shiny pink pants) or her idiosyncracy (like the pilly green turtleneck everyone hated).

This morning, it was more her vanity calling out to be satisfied. Did she want the ponytail high? Nah. Too severe. Braids? Carmen looked saucy when she arranged her hair into two braids on the sides, but Bee’s pale hair made her look like Heidi. Anyway, how much did she want to use that particular weapon?

The Hair, as Tibby called it. It had launched a thousand comments. Cars honked and delivery guys whistled; even respectable men looked too long. Hairdressers exclaimed over it as though it were a living miracle. The Hair. Marly’s hair, Greta’s hair. In fact, it was nothing more than a bunch of dead cells sprouting out of her scalp, but it was her birthright.

Do I want you to notice me?
she wondered, leaning so close to the mirror that her eyes formed one large Cyclops eye.

The mirror in the cramped cabin was speckled with gray and only showed the story from midhip to midforehead. If she backed up, she’d be sitting in Katie’s messy bunk.

She shouldn’t care about this so much. She felt an annoying buzzing around her head: expectations, clustering like so many mosquitoes. She did not like those. She refused to have them.

She would just…throw on the first pair of shorts she found. And okay, so they were the really nice short blue Adidas ones. And the first top. Well, the second, because that was the white tank with the racing back, and it looked better than the first one. And the hair. She’d just leave it down. She was not setting a trap. She was not! She was just…in a hurry. A coach could not be late. She pulled a hair elastic around her wrist just in case.

She loped out of the cabin barefoot, swinging her cleats by the laces. She’d grown so much, she would probably be taller than Eric in her cleats.

Five coaches were already milling around on the center field. One of them happened to be Eric. Not that her eyes went there first.

Having finally read the camp’s handbook in the hour after sunrise when she couldn’t sleep, she now knew the deal. The camp was split into girls’ and boys’ sides. Each side was broken into six teams. They played soccer for four hours every morning. They put the boys and girls together for speed and agility training for an hour after lunch, and then for the other activities—swimming, waterskiing, hiking, rafting, and all kinds of other campish things. After dinner they had a couple of free hours. Usually there was a movie or something.

Now that she’d bothered to look at the roster of coaches, on which Eric Richman’s name did indeed appear in twelve-point type and which had sat folded inside an envelope in her room at home for several weeks, unread, Bridget knew she was assigned to coach a boys’ team. That was all right. Diana was coaching one on the girls’ side, that was the only negative. They would have had fun together.

Bridget sat down in the middle of the field and plucked out the socks she’d balled up in her shoes. She pulled them on and laced up her cleats. She felt the warm sunshine on the top of her head.

It’s different now. It’s all different
, she was telling herself. But she was not sure her self was listening. Eric circled close to her, with the slightly bemused expression he had often worn around her two summers before. She followed him with her eyes.

The campers were gathering. They were supposed to all be between the ages of ten and fourteen, but the boys particularly were so varied it was almost comical. Some looked like little kids. Some looked nearly like grown men.

She saw Manny, assigned to be her trainer, whom she’d met during coaches’ meetings the day before. She waved to him and he waved back.

The boys’ director blew his whistle. Joe Warshaw. He’d played for the San José Earthquakes, a major claim to fame. Bridget jumped to her feet, shaking out her legs. This was exciting. She’d coached unofficially in Burgess, Alabama, the previous summer. She’d coached at clinics. She’d assisted the JV coach at school a bunch of times. But she’d never coached her own team before.

She knew her reputation preceded her. She’d already heard whispering behind her back at breakfast that morning. She was not only the youngest coach but also the only high school all-American this year.

She spent most of her life in places where her soccer accomplishments didn’t matter that much. Her friends weren’t athletes. They were as supportive as they could possibly be. All three of them had cried at her awards ceremony. But they didn’t understand what it meant—nor did she really want them to. She loved how much they loved her for everything else. Her dad, always preoccupied, thought being an all-American was basically comparable to making varsity. And her brother had come to a grand total of one of her games. But here it was like being a celebrity. These kids worshipped the things she’d accomplished. And Eric. He, of all people, knew what it meant.

She ended up at Eric’s side as the director called out the teams. Not entirely on purpose. He was the only one she knew. (How strangely she knew him.) And it was a perfectly natural place to stand.

It’s not like I’m going to do that again
, she promised herself.

Sometimes when she thought of Eric, and now more powerfully when she saw him, she felt some achy nostalgia for her old self. For the dauntless, daring soul she used to be. There was something vaguely enchanted about that time. There were certain qualities you possessed carelessly. And you couldn’t retrieve them when they were gone. The very act of caring made them impossible to regain.